Melvin Tolson
Abstract
African American modernist poet Melvin B. Tolson was prolific in several genres from the 1930s through the 1960s. Tolson received several awards for his poetry during his lifetime. Tolson's engagement with free verse in his first collection ignites his exuberance concerning vernacular forms, including the blues. In the poem Harlem, which opens A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, half of the sixteen stanzas are blues lyrics. In contrast to T. S. Eliot's modernism, Tolson offers a more optimistic assessment of modern life. The faith in an optimistic unfolding of the future seen in Rendezvous continues into Tolson's work in the 1950s with Libretto for the Republic of Liberia. The result of Tolson's long engagement with modernism, Harlem Gallery presents a complex dialectical understanding of common dichotomies of race, culture, and speech that ultimately revises the narratives of modernism and of African American poetry, and exemplifies Afro-modernist poetics.
Publication Title
A Companion to Modernist Poetry
Recommended Citation
Schultz, K. (2014). Melvin Tolson. A Companion to Modernist Poetry, 515-525. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118604427.ch43
